Tuesday, 10 April, 2012

One of the things I’m liking at the moment about FF XIV is the story. It’s nothing great, visit this but for me it is the way the story is being introduced. I’m only low level at the moment, cure so this could all go away as I level up, but certainly at the low level the story telling is very different.

In SWTOR as a smuggler you start off losing your ship to another smuggler… and that’s the start of the “Chapter 1” of your class quests.. all of the class quests from here on in are a single “story-arc” aimed at getting your ship back. It sounds cool, but really it’s quite a bit of highly directed deliver this, kill that style of questing. Mostly you don’t really know what you are going to do next until someone tells you to do it.

In FF you don’t really have a class quest at the low level, you all go through the same main storylines… different stories per starting area (there are 3). This could be rubbish, but actually while you are doing these small quests there are cutscenes, Unusally, in several of these you, as a character as well as a player, are just the observer. These cutscenes are story telling, you’re just in the right place at the right time to overhear conversations you probably shouldn’t have, their purpose is to progress the story-arc. Introduce the lore as it were. Making you-the-character and you-the-player both experience the same event as an observer provides an interesting dimension. Anyway, by discovering that there are significant things going on that started before you arrived on the scene, and that have been going on while you’ve been tootling around killing rats all helps to give the story a sense of anticipation.

I’ve not explained well, I’ll try again – in SWTOR you are the main character, the world pretty much revolves about you. In FF XIV you are the adventurer caught up in events that are much larger than you.